Graphic Novels: A New Opportunity For Writers?

I have been working with author and director Xavier Leret to convince him that he should abandon the old ‘wait for a break’ process of artistic career building and get into self-publishing and building an audience for himself.

One of his creations is this character called Jimmy. This is the same Jimmy of Killing Seals that I blogged about last week.

It is a violent epic about a tough guy with no arms. Xav’s original idea was to make it into a film but its difficult because the budget would be so huge. There is something cultish about Jimmy. He’s like something out of a Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie movie but with a freakshow edge. I have always seen it as a graphic novel because, like good anime, it can show some of the impossible pictures that are in Xav’s mind.

This is why I was buzzed to read in Wired all about a HalfLife2 mod called gMod made by a guy called Garry Newman (no, not the eighties pop star!).

GMod’s special tools help users go way beyond standard run-and-gun gameplay. You can use it to cobble together your own Rube Goldberg machines with any object in the game environment. Or force characters you redesign to assume strange poses, then shoot pictures of them through a plethora of effects filters. Sick of bullets Reprogram weapons to spray beer or blood or bird poop at opponents. From Wired.

Like Machinima for video, one of the uses for gMod is to design and pose characters in custom environments to create comic books like this one – Concerned. Jimmy would be fantastic in a gMod world.

It is so exciting to see where the tools of creativity are heading. Think of a story > stage it in Halflife2 using gMod > print it on demand at lulu.com > sell it through Amazon… all at practically zero cost. All you need is talent.

Looking Beyond the Immediate Future

Is it just my world or are we focussed too much on the near future I like to think of myself as someone that looks beyond what can be done now but when I see things like this video of Jeff Han at the TED conference I realise that I am way too focussed on Web 2.0, RSS, participatory media, the next video sharing technology, etc… It’s refreshing to see stuff like this. Can I have one

Let's Try Out This Crowd-Sourcing Mullarky

I’ve uploaded my Social Broadcasting idea to Cambrian House. Let’s see how it goes in the Idea Warz!

Now go and vote for it! Let’s make this thing!

Ads and a Continuum of Evil?

My friend Mick sent me a MySpace message today. The message itself was not in the email which MySpace sent. Instead I needed to go to MySpace site and login. The process was made quite difficult and of course I saw a plethora of horrid ads in the process. As a user, what did I NEED to do to see the message Just go to my MySpace page and there it is… Mick’s comment. The process evidently forced me to login, and did not make that process easy, just so that MySpace could make some moola from ad impressions.

I started to think that the ad-supported software universe can be seen as a continuum of ‘evil’. At one end of the spectrum is MySpace where the content comes from the users. While the advertisers want to be where these users are, they don’t want to be associated with what they are saying so the pages are polluted with low-revenue, ‘run-of-network’ casino ads.

At the other end of the continuum are the adware companies that know too much about me.

Its quite difficult to build a business on ads without becoming ‘evil’.

The Holy Grail of Social Nets – Not Solved Yet

Of Social Nets & Business Models

How will advertisers come together with the dangerous chaos that is user-generated content Today it is still an uncomfortable relationship. It is an important problem to solve because social nets can target advertising very well.

The problem is when there is a Coke ad apparently sponsoring a page that has a mashup of a copyrighted song, bad language, etc…

The Anti-Internet or a Ying to the Web 2.0 Yang

This post suggests that Google is killing the economics of content by creating an opportunity for others to build dodgy (in my opinion) businesses. The company in this posting – NameMedia has the following business model:

• Buy domain names that users will logically go to for useful information such as Photography.com.
• Build a website around each of these domain names. Nearly all the links are ad links disguised as content links.

This company has 650,000 domain names which attract 25 million consumers per month – like moths to the flame. They offer no value. They are a business that is 100% setup to make money at the expense of users.

This is basically an adware model. ‘Toolbar’ products do exactly the same thing. When the user types in a dodgy URL, the tolbar will redirect the user to a page of useless sponsored links powered by an ad engine like Adsense.

It is troubling.

While web 2.0/socal media/etc stands in the light, the other half of the internet is making billions in the shadows.

Idea: Karma Bank

We need a ‘karma bank’ where online reputation is managed as securely as $.

MySpace is Having Kazaa-Like Problems

Does this happen to all software that young people adopt

Schools try to block, users circumvent. Struggling to get high value advertising, Casino-on-net rules! Congressional concern over child safety…

Poisonous gas that needs to be sealed

I bet you don't know what 'manualism' is?!

This is very funny!

Power Law of Participation

Power Law of Participation

Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield.

Ross Mayfield has taken Chris Andeson’s Long Tail model and applied it to the process of contribution in a digital universe.

It is one of those clever, crystalising images that is a useful framework for hanging conceptual thinking.

A functioning community ecosystem benefits from knowing the journey users take as they traverse the long tail.

I wondered about this in my crude idea for a video product – how do users move from being ‘consumers’ to participants or ‘minipreneurs’